Zerista Aims at Small Community Mobile Social Networking

Zerista is a new platform for managing smaller mobile communities, allowing groups to create schedules, send messages, conduct chats, take payments, support checkin operations, send invites, show maps and browse member lists.

This new mobile platform is either an informal or formal mashup of Ning, Eventbrite, Twitter and Foursquare for small groups, in other words.

The business model currently provides free use of the application for groups of 250 or less, then a charge for using the platform to support larger groups, such as convention or trade show groups.

Zerista believes there is a gap in the marketplace between social software for large groups, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are well suited to large macro communities. But those tools might not especially meet the needs of local or "mirco"-sized groups such as soccer leagues, wine clubs or agents working for a single realtor, for example.

In the mobile context, the issue of community "size" is important if you consider the cost of creating a mobile app that could do this, or even several versions of the app to work on a couple major mobile operating systems. Zerista is set up as a "cloud" application that can be published for use by mobile devices without the need to create a special app.